May 8, 2014

Philosophy 101

I’ve always considered myself a philosophical sort. Well, I spend a lot of time sitting around thinking about shit. And that’s philosophy, ain’t it? I consider myself first and foremost a student of life. And I’m always sort of studying life and researching it. And periodically I’ll weigh in with a piece of artwork, which sort of represents my findings to date.

Though admittedly I find the word “philosophy” a little pretentious or high-fallutin’. “Hey, whatcha’ doin’ over there?” “Why. I’m sitting here. . . philosophizing. Yeah, that’s it.” Actually, I’m sitting around thinking, basically just trying to figure out what the fuck. But that doesn’t sound as impressive. I look at life, basically, as a fascinating mystery. This mind-boggling puzzle that we all get to play with.

All we know for sure is: we’re born, we live, and we die, and in between all sorts of weird stuff happens to us. Everything else is a matter of opinion, I guess. For some odd reason, the only thing I’m really sure about in this cockamainey life is that the whole universe is one unified thing. I guess most people call it “God.” But that term always seemed a little too loaded for me. So I prefer One Unified Thing.

I guess most people see the world as made of of zillions of individual things. That maybe are only loosely — if that — inter-connected with each other. But I’m sticking with the One Unified Thing concept. When I try (and usually fail) to explain this idea to other people, I try to illustrate it by holding up one finger. Which we can see as an individual entity, right? The different fingers even have different, distinct names: “index finger,” “middle finger,” and so on. But then when you look at your entire hand you realize the finger wasn’t an individual entity to begin with. I mean, there’s not an invisible line that separates the finger from the rest of the hand. Its an artificially constructed concept, when you really think of it. It was one unified hand all along.

Or take one’s “lap.” When you sit down, you have a lap. And its a noun, as if its a distinct thing. But its really a noun masquerading as a verb, as a process. When you stand up, your “lap” suddenly disappears into nothing. It never really existed as a distinct thing in the first place.

When you look at the world on a molecular level, you find out that the line that separates all the different things is a lot hazier than you might think. Just like that hazy line that supposedly separates your finger from your hand. Take a drop of rain-water (H2O for those of you scientifically inclined). That rain molecule falls from the sky, gets absorbed into the grass, gets eaten by a cow, which in turn gets eaten by us as hamburger, who then in turn piss it back out, it evaporates back up into the sky, turns back into rain water, and the whole cycle repeats itself. Endlessly. In endless variations. You realize on the molecular level there really aren’t hard-and-fast borders between the different things. Its more like an ocean of inter-connected, and seemingly unified, molecules.

I look at my individual human body (so-called) the same way I look at a chunk of ice (more of that H2 stuff). The water molecules are temporarily frozen together in this form. But soon enough the ice melts and the molecules merge back in with the ocean of water. Just like my body is temporarily held together in this form, but all too soon I’ll die and merge back into the primordial mud from which I sprang.

Sometimes I’d look at my feral cats. And sure, I look at them as individual cats with individual names. But sometimes I’d get this funny feeling that there’s really only one cat. This Universal Cat. That inhabits the bodies of all the individual cats.

The Indian philosophy of Vedanta comes closest to describing all this stuff to my satisfaction. According to Vedanta, God basically decided to play a game of Hide-and-Seek with Himself. For no other reason than cosmic kicks. I mean, look at it from God’s perspective. He’s got all of eternity to endless experience His glory and splendor. I could see how He might get bored with His eternal greatness after awhile (“Yeah, yeah, I’m great, tell Me something I don’t know already!”) and get a tremendous kick out of dumbing down, putting on blinders, and seeing how the other half lives. Kind of a “Prince and the Pauper” deal, slumming it for kicks. After experiencing Himself as Immortal for all Infinity, it might be the ultimate kick to experience Himself as mortal and finite.

So God disguises Himself as all the individual creatures of this world, disguises Himself so well that He actually forgets He did it in the first place. And then spends endless eons trying to find Himself again. Finally, after zillions of lifetimes He discovers that, whattaya’ know, He had been God after all. And lives happily ever after as God. The end. It might sound whacky. But think about it. God’s pretty smart. He could pull off a deal like that if He really wanted to. And like I said, He’s got all of eternity, so He’s got a lot of time to play around with. You figure eventually He’d come up with a crazy game like the Human Being game.

Oddly, one of my very first childhood memories when I was two or three was playing hide-and-seek in the cemetery behind my Dad’s church. I can still picture in my memory all the neighborhood kids running around and hiding behind the tombstones. So I guess the hide-and-seek impulse is pretty engrained in our psyches.

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Mind proceeds matter is Vedantic theory. One Universal Mind that dreams the whole universe. Then there is the scientific theory that matter precedes mind. Brain is simple an organ if the body where mind, according to them, is only an excretion of the brain, like bile from the liver. I prefer the Vedantic view that the world is unified and material objects are just crystalized or “dense” thoughts.